Saturday 17 August 2013 01.00 EDT
First published on Saturday 17 August 2013 01.00 EDT

Neill Blomkamp has a vision of 2154, and it's not good news. His prognosis finds Earth in a sorry state: the whole world has become the third world, with the extremely wealthy 1% abandoning our ravaged planet for Elysium, a luxurious space station. Earth is a giant slum, a totalitarian nightmare in which citizens live like rats with Elysium glowing above them, like "Bel Air in space," says Blomkamp.

To underline the yawning chasm between the haves and have-nots of his future dystopia, Blomkamp decided that the only contemporary location that could accurately convey the grimness of life on Earth in the 22nd century was the world's second-biggest garbage dump, in Mexico City. But when he and his crew actually turned up to the Bordo Poniente landfill, he began to regret his decision. "It was pretty goddamn terrible," he laughs, now safely ensconced in a London hotel suite. "There were a lot of production people trying to put me off that location. The Canadian unions got involved; they wanted toxicology reports because they were concerned about their members. So we got approval. Then a few months later, day one of the dump, we were driving into it at dawn, and the smell went inside the car. And quietly I was thinking I might have bitten off more than I could chew. It was like: 'Holy shit. I don't know if I can do this for two weeks.' But it looks rad, right?"

It does. One of the key features of the original Star Wars is that its worlds aren't perfect: they have a lived-in quality. Elysium runs with that idea, its bleak future Earth looking less lived-in than royally shat on. "Battered," agrees Blomkamp. "Fucked up. Hammered on. I love that, though. It makes it feel real. My main thing is realism."

Elysium is only his second feature after the sublimely bizarre District 9, but all of Blomkamp's work, including his short films and commercials (remember Citroën's dancing Transformer?) have a singular voice. In his worlds, robots and aliens mix with humans, high-tech body-modification is rife, and society is screwed. The seeds of this vision were sown in his youth. He grew up in apartheid-era Johannesburg and fell for sci-fi early, notably Alien and its sequel. By 14, he was a computer graphics whizz kid; at 17, he and his family, fleeing the violence of their homeland, emigrated to Canada, where he became a visual effects artist. His short film Alive In Joburg caught the attention of Peter Jackson, who hired him for a film adaptation of the Halo videogame, but corporate politics nixed the project. It was a blessing in disguise, says Blomkamp: the day after Halo folded, Jackson encouraged him to forge ahead with his own film, District 9, which told of ghettoised aliens and corrupt bureaucracy, and was a critical and commercial banger, celebrated for its sci-fi japes as well as its political allegory.

Suddenly, all of Hollywood wanted him, but he didn't bite. "I actually didn't go to a lot of the meetings. District 9 was very difficult to make, but I knew it was a film I would love to watch. And I wanted to hang on to that feeling. I started remembering what happened on Halo. Just the fact that they refer to stories as IP – intellectual property – is fucking terrifying. Any discussions that begin: 'Neill should look at this piece of IP', I can't even go to that meeting. So I really didn't engage with anything. Although when MGM was starting to do Robocop, I was like, 'Fuck me, that film would be awesome to redo.' It's one of my favourite films of all time, it struck so close to home. But then I thought: 'Well, Paul Verhoeven already did it and it was awesome.'"

'The only way things will change is if we're smart enough to develop technology that can think us out of this, meaning augmenting ourselves genetically to be smart enough to change shit'

His integrity intact, Blomkamp moved on. Elysium may be set in the future, but it's merely an amplification of an age-old problem. "The issues raised by Elysium have been in existence as long as homo sapiens," he argues. "You'd literally have to change the human genome to stop wealth discrepancy. But it's happening now on a globalised level. The outsourcing of whatever you need done, at low cost, can happen in a different country; you don't even need to know about it any more." Elysium brings all of this into the multiplex, and the film's substantial thrills and spills don't disguise Blomkamp's glum outlook. "That's good, that's what I wanted people to think," he says. "We have biological systems built into us that were very advantageous for us, up until we became a functioning civilisation 10,000 years ago. We are literally genetically coded to preserve life, procreate and get food – and that's not gonna change. The question is whether you can somehow overpower certain parts of that mammalian DNA and try to give some of your money out, try to take your wealth and pour it out for the rest of the planet."

Watching Elysium, it's apparent he thinks the human race is probably buggered, although the solution he's holding out for is reassuringly Blomkampian. "The only way things will change is if we're smart enough to develop technology that can think us out of this, meaning augmenting ourselves genetically to be smart enough to change shit," he says. "Or to have artificial intelligence and programs to help solve the problems."

Given his South African upbringing, divisions infuse Blomkamp's work. Like District 9, Elysium deals with segregation, although this time the metaphor is not racial but financial. He believes the increase in population and decrease in resources means the whole planet will become one big Johannesburg of fortified communities nestling next to slums. "Then we'll go beyond that timeline," he says, "and it'll either be a singularity discussion or this Mad Max fuckin' group of savages roaming on the horizon, a Malthusian catastrophe."

Elysium is brimming with macro and micro metaphor. The film's intransigent robot parole officer was inspired by Blomkamp's experiences with automated bureaucracy ("I'll actually huck the phone across the room trying to deal with a bank"); a nasty radiation incident has parallels with developing-world labour (specifically, he says, the Bangladesh textile industry); while the totalitarian slumland was inspired by his own 2005 arrest by cops on the bribe in Tijuana. He is, however, eager to stress he doesn't believe films can bring about societal change. He's not dishing out messages, he says, but observations, entrenched in popcorn thrill-rides. Just as District 9 grew out of Johannesburg's woes but needed aliens to turn him on, Blomkamp wouldn't have explored Elysium's wealth-discrepancy angle without a sci-fi filter; he's first and foremost a visual fetishist. The idea, in fact, came to him from a National Geographic illustration of the proposed Stanford Torus space station by concept artist Syd Mead (he subsequently hired Mead to design Elysium's luxury environs). Indeed, Matt Damon was sold on Elysium after Blomkamp showed him his notebooks crammed with details on the film's weapons and vehicles. "Where I'm lucky," Blomkamp says, "is that the robotics and explosions and vehicles are all genuinely coming from me, and there's a large demographic of people who like that stuff."

His next film, Chappie, is a sci-fi comedy about a police robot, and will feature Ninja and Yo-Landi from Die Antwoord, Cape Town's finest electro-rap provocateurs. Blomkamp reached out to them after seeing their debut video, and they've been itching to collaborate since ("My bodyguard help me get to the bar/ Neill Blomkamp's makin' me a movie star", sang Yo-Landi on last year's Baby's On Fire). "The movie's awesome," raves Blomkamp of Chappie. "Die Antwoord are playing themselves as a crime syndicate: music's not working out so they've gotten into crime in Joburg. I really love their stuff, the fusion of South African insanity that makes them cool."

Chappie will be funnier than the largely earnest Elysium, satirical rather than political, he says, and closer in tone to District 9. But either way, the edge will be there: social commentary may take a back seat to genre kicks, but it is undeniably the bedrock of Blomkamp's work. "If you're not somewhat political or observant, I'm not sure you're an artist," he says. "I'm not actually sure what you're doing."